During the SDCC 2011 World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo Swag Show panel, Chris Metzen, Micky Neilson and Christie Golden revealed details of the upcoming novels line-up from Gallery Books — a division of CBS and Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Christie Golden is writing a brand-new World of Warcraft novel based on the Alliance. Chris Metzen says that’s two Alliance books counting World of Warcraft: Wolfheart by Richard A. Knaak.

This new book by Christie Golden doesn’t have a title yet, but Metzen described it is focused on Jaina Proudmoore. The post-Cataclysm tensions are ramping up a few notches up between the Alliance and the Horde again.

We should expect life-changing events coming for Jaina Proudmoore (Metzen and Christie Golden grin enigmatically as this was said).

There are plans to create a World of Warcraft: Wolfheart Audiobook. Blizzard is playing with the idea of innovating with audiobooks by introducing audio dramas: music, special effect sounds, voices from the game — something new they are excited about.

Transcript

Chris Metzen: “Just to give you an overview of some of the things we are doing, we just released World of Warcraft: Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects — which for the record takes place before patch 4.2. That kinda ties a lot of Thrall’s weird daddy issues and such.

We did World of Warcraft: Wolfheart with Richard A. Knaak and we have been developing that for a while. Now for all of you Alliance fans who feel we have been riffing on the Horde and/or Thrall for too long — Wolfheart definitely doubles down on the Alliance. We are pretty much getting into King Varian’s nature kinda been possessed by the spirit of the wolf god Lo’Gosh, who’s also the source of the Worgen transformation.

So his nature is potentially the high King of the Alliance, what kind of man he is, how’s the inclusion of the Worgen and all that history playing with the current vibe of the Alliance, and how this guy is doing as King.

I can tell you we want to see Varian become a character that is highly beloved.

The StarCraft: Ghost–Spectres book it’s been a long time in the making. For those of you who remember, we were developing a console game many years ago called GHOST, featuring a character named Nova.

Many years ago, we put out a book named StarCraft Ghost: Nova, which was essentially that character’s origin and at long last the Spectres novel is essentially the novelization of what the game StarCraft: Ghost would have been.

That game plot, Nova’s kinda champion level adventures. Spectres has a lot to do with that. In the novel, Gabriel Tosh — in the front cover — is a character we have jammed for Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. All of these characters have a pretty deep background, and we are very excited about that book.

A couple of other things, the title is sketchy but we are doing a Diablo book that’s coming up umm that essentially — ugh how do I say this without getting in trouble, uh — very significant amount of time has passed between the last Diablo expansion (Diablo II: Lord of Destruction) and the game that we are currently working on (Diablo III), so the book that is coming out which features Deckard Cain is going to bridge the gap between Diablo games past and what we are currently developing and it’s coming really-really cool, pretty dark.

It gets into the lore of the Horadrim, kinda the group that originally put Diablo down.

We are also working on Christie by the way. She is working on a new Warcraft book. This will make Alliance in the room very happy, and you get two Alliance books in a row, and as it turns out, but the new book — it still doesn’t have a title yet attached to it currently, but it’s going to — tensions post-Cataclysm between the Alliance and the Horde are ramping up again. This book is going to focus on Jaina Proudmoore, a character we haven’t really been able to do a whole lot over the years, but she’s definitely got some life changes coming, and her story is going to literally kick ass and really begin to take the tension between the Alliance and the Horde up a few notches going forward.

To wrap up those are the novels we are cooking in the oven as we speak.”